Raycast powers productivity for hundreds of thousands of users and has a vibrant community of more than 20,000 developers. With a lean team of just over 30 people, most are engineers, their support has to be as smart and efficient as their product.

The challenge

As Raycast grew, managing support requests across multiple channels – Slack, email, Reddit, Twitter, and in-app forms – became harder to keep track of. The team struggled with prioritizing requests and integrating support with their engineering workflows.

A lack of threading and prioritization made it hard for their team to manage feature requests and bug reports, and resolve issues in the right order. Tirta Wulandari from their support team noted, "We realized we were treating every issue with the same priority, which wasn't efficient or scalable."

Why Plain?
When evaluating platforms to migrate from email-based support, Raycast considered a few different options. Plain stood out for a few key reasons:

• Developer-first approach

• Modern UI and UX

• Deep integrations with Slack and Linear

• Streamlined handling of multi-channel support requests

Daniel, who oversees Raycast’s support and community, shared, "Plain is solving a very real problem with a modern, developer-first solution. It’s been a game-changer for us."

The solution

Raycast adopted Plain to take control of their support operations, and consolidate their support channels. Here’s how they use Plain to speed up and improve their workflows:

• Unified support across channels: All support requests, whether from Slack, email, or in-app forms, are routed to Plain. This ensures that nothing slips through the cracks and means the team can manage requests efficiently from one place.

• Easy prioritization: Urgent issues and blocking bugs are flagged automatically using keywords with workflow rules, and auto-triaged with Plain AI. This ensures the team can focus on high-impact problems without wasting time on manual sorting. 

• Stronger collaboration: With Discussions, engineers can collaborate directly on support tickets in Slack. Bugs are validated and escalated to Linear with just a few keyboard strokes, creating a smooth flow from issue discovery to resolution.

• Customizable workflows: The team leveraged Plain’s API to surface customer data like user details and Stripe billing information directly into support tickets, eliminating repetitive back-and-forth with a customer to dig into an issue.

• Improved insight into feedback: Feature requests and bug reports are logged more effectively, giving the whole product team visibility into what matters most to their customers.

The impact

Since adopting Plain, Raycast has transformed the way it handles support, and empowered their support team, with:

• Simplified queue management: One centralized platform for every support conversation has replaced the need for multiple tools, reducing the amount of context switching the team needs to do to help a customer. Their support team no longer needs to juggle Slack, email, and form fills independently.

• Faster response times: With automated prioritization workflows, the most critical issues are resolved faster. The ability to triage and escalate high-priority issues quickly means paying customers and urgent bugs are addressed as fast as humanly possible.

• Stronger internal collaboration: Engineers and support teams now collaborate faster. Raycast’s streamlined workflow reduces context-switching and ensures clear communication between different teams, leading to quicker resolutions and happier customers.

• Actionable insights from reporting: Plain’s reporting enables the team to track support trends and identify repetitive issues. This helps them allocate resources more efficiently, and drives improvements in their documentation and product education.

• Customer satisfaction: The ability to close the loop on Linear issues directly in Slack or Plain has improved communication with customers, earning positive feedback from the Raycast community.

Tirta highlighted these improvements, saying, "With Plain, I can now go back to a Slack message and inform the user immediately when an issue is resolved. It's straightforward and user-friendly."

As Raycast continues to grow, expanding its platform to Windows and iOS, the team plans to increase its support operations. They are also exploring how to better separate community management from support roles, given the overlap in responsibilities. Plain's flexibility and developer-first design make it the right tool to support the evolving needs of their team.